How Boomerang CEO Aye Moah grew Boomerang to $10M revenue with a 20 person team in 2024.

hi everybody my name is a mo uh I go by my last name MO is a Burmese name and there's a whole different story on why we don't have a paternal last name system um I'm going to talk about well before we talk about what we're going to talk about I'll tell you what Boomerang is we're the OG of the email productivity category we invented the snooze button you now see in Gmail outl superhuman even slack it's a free meaness product that allows you to manage your inbox followups and meeting scheduling and we've been doing the plg route before it even had a name and at the beginning of this year we decided that 2024 is going to be the year of experiments so far this this year we have executed 44 experiments about one experiment a week about that pace a little bit more they arrang from marketing product Improvement product virality building practices and a few more and these experiments resulted in about 500k of ARR 6% of our total revenue and over the next 20 minutes I'm going to talk about the three most interesting tests that we run our a journey to boostrapping to 8 million and what's the benefit of choosing to run the company that way so the first one that I pick was because it's the highest impact in terms of Revenue we are a Freeman SAS so as a Freeman company many of our trials will convert to free basic user at the end of the trial and this is just part of the funnel that we initially didn't spend too much time optimizing because our free- topay conversion was pretty good compared to the Benchmark so we kind of neglected it over the year and when we were kind of looking at what experiments to start it seems like a very good high impact with low effort ratio to start and over the four experiments so it was you know four iterative experiments we got about 250k worth of asan new subscriber from free users converting to pay and it's really kind of stupid simple right we have this Blue Link we're asking them to buy a subscription we just switch it to the red button and at some point our team was joking that should we rename the year of experiment to the year of big red buttons so if you're on a marketing team or a Founder with a marketing team you go back and ask them have you try a red button um the next one is it's the easiest experiment you can do no code require a marketing team a marketing person a Founder can do it in one day but before I do that I want to ask does everybody know what Dunning emails are no okay so in a in a recurring subscription business we have to charge them at the time of renewal and for various reason credit card bank account any kind of technical anomalies some of those payments will not go through and they are called involuntary churn and you want to really reduce involuntary churn because these customers are already paying for it they love your product they already using it they don't want to leave so why would you let them go right and as we have tons of thousands of individual subscriber for us it's a great Roi to work on this part uh examples of Dunning emails are one of for B2B slack is your payment information up to date because something didn't go through the one on the right is the Amazon b2c email they are about violating the red button rules here um so all we did was at three arra email email that extended the time period from 13 days to 21 days and added the three extra email in the middle and I swear I'm not talking about three extra email for every single experiment but somehow that's what happened the rules are you going to increase urgency as you write the email the one really little known fact is you don't want to send those email on the same weekday is there's a really weird quirky thing with bank account and credit cards sometimes you're like oh I'll just send you know every seven days a reminder to update your payment bad idea you want to vary the Cadence between the three five seven so that you are not dropping on the same weekday you want a clear CTA again ideally a red button so we put three red button in the middle and people are afraid of losing what they already have so if you PR like basically point out what they are going to lose by not going and fixing this payment problem that usually convert better and I really don't think I need to say this right remain polite and professional I have gotten some businesses getting more desperate car salesmen tected of like you got to do this now with the you know red exclamation point you don't need to do that you can be polite professional and cous and that works a lot better if you have B2B subscriber by invoices you it's still the same thing there are some reason the invoices are not going through you want to recover that you can still do that so what's the results our recovery rate went up 12% that's like a big boost in retention these subscribers are subscribers they already use love your product don't you want to retain 12% more every single a month and we went from 29 percentile in our industry in our ticket side this is from rarly so they have a benchmark for everybody who uses Rari to 52nd percentile in the industry so we went up quite a bit right bought and third to slightly above average but that means we still have room to grow so we intend to add a couple more rounds of experiments in the same vein uh before uhoh ACC all right uh can okay let me see talk through it okay okay before I talk about the next experiment most people don't know Boomerang now offers a fully integrated meeting scheduling built into your email and Rajesh talk about how important amp and interactivity in email is and how it reduces the clip through friction right what we are doing is a live image in your email of your calendar right in there and it will update real time with your availability as it go by and it works across all clients not just in Gmail not just in uh Yahoo mail everything that email client that can display image our technology works so we we wanted to do uh so to talk about this experiment at end understanding you need to know that we actually do meeting scheduling so when Boomerang users are sending out meetings the guests are clicking through so the in email image they are clicking through they got here their confirmation so this is the virality of our product right if you have one Boomerang user sending out 100 meetings they are 100 people coming across Boomerang experience and the pitch is very simple you just had a great meeting scheduling experience don't you want that for yourself if you if we improve this from whatever the current conversion is to a little bit better the virality is keeps improving 100 people come across two of them convert we have two new user for free then those two people send out another 100 messages you get another two users for free it goes in on so we have a very good hypothesis it's a high leverage page and the designers are like let's put more value prop right explain so the first the one on the top is the control and the variant a and variant B so Pop Quiz anybody wants to take a guess on which variant one B why image images are convincing that was a trick question both variants lost to control so what do you do right you have a great hypothesis great theory on why this should work you go the opposite direction we took out all the bright color buttons branding is gone no marketing info we kept the original oneline schedule meetings with Boomerang and it w up from 1% to basically 20 blend it across maybe like 14% because we have less Outlook users in general so what I'm trying to say is sometimes you would have a hypothesis very convinced it will win one it's lost do you throw it up and just say done this was a bad idea I was around no you can try go going the completely radical opposite direction and see how it works and what I want you to take away from this is not hey go try a minimalist page design I don't know your customer I don't know your industry I don't know your product what you have to take away is when something doesn't go the way you expect it your original thesis is not proven try a different way and be happy to eat the Humble Pie right the point point of the experiment is not to prove you right you're right it's about finding the truth and it's really a great experience for getting the team aligned in the same direction if you have a designer they hate this they are like why would this win right and what you want for a team is your team to not have the attitude of everybody trying to prove themselves right and trying to prove their my fathers this is good you want everybody completely ly on every experiment regardless of Whose idea it is you want the team completely aligned to win or lose and losing is fine right if the experiment fail you learn something the point of experiment is again to find the truth and from those 44 experiments in eight months we learn a few lessons we have 19 cesses those are now part of the product making this extra 500k of ARR 10 failures that we learn some of them are like there's no way this can lose and they did and 15 currently in flight and to make our original go of 52 experiment in a year we have eight more to go um from the lesson second order effect is really subtle and I have this Horror Story of one of the experiment if you look at in isolation it was a winner we put a download button on our one of the help tutorial page from the conversion it...